


duty derelict

by soliari



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, Izuna Uchiha's List Of Restaurants His Spouses Have Been Banned From, Minor Original Character(s), Mito Uzumaki's Insufferably Smug Aura, Multi, No Village AU, Tobirama Senju's Unstoppable Duckling Tendencies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:08:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22063057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soliari/pseuds/soliari
Summary: Mito, Izuna and Tobirama take lunch. Eventually.
Relationships: Senju Tobirama/Uchiha Izuna/Uzumaki Mito
Comments: 1
Kudos: 28





	duty derelict

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cephea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cephea/gifts).



> someone finally cracked the code on getting me to write naruto fanfiction in 2020: bribe me
> 
> anyway, ceph, hope you like your fresh delivery of serotonin in this, the worst season of the year!

Mito's office overlooks the town. When Uzushio finally accepted the business of governing needed somewhere to be done besides the Uzumaki estates, they'd fought for six years about where to put it, until her great-great-etc-grandmother went down to the center of the island and set down a flag. They'd all - including her great-great-etc-grandfather - fallen in quickly enough after that, crafting a building safe from fire and flood, for the unlucky bastard who had to run the place. Mito had known since she was eight years that one day that unlucky bastard would be her, simply because she couldn't think of anyone else masochistic enough for it. Looking at the stack of amended expense reports that had been dumped on her desk this morning, she wonders if it's possible someone _else_ grew up wanting to be an unlucky bastard and was just waiting for the chance to do this part of her job. It doesn't seem likely - an unfortunate prospect.

She glances up when there's a knock at the door. "Come in," she says. The door slides open to reveal her assistant, looking harried. "What happened?"

"Ah, it's just... you have a visitor," her assistant says.

"I thought I said I wasn't taking any visitors on account of the council meeting this morning," Mito answers.

"He really insisted."

Mito frowns, and nearly tells the girl to send him in, for a reminder of proper etiquette, but then it's Izuna who's poking his head in. "Mito, are you still working? It's nearly one," says her husband.

"Izuna," Mito says, voice a warning.

"I'm not sure what that look is for," Izuna says, entering the room and closing the door behind him with a pleasant nod to her assistant. "I'm only doing my job as your government-assigned trophy husband," he continues, leaning his hip against the front of her desk and tucking his hands together over his stomach.

"If you were a trophy husband, you might have been quieter," Mito muses, leaning her cheek on her knuckles.

"Don't consider it so seriously," Izuna says, tilting his weight back from the desk, and laughs when she meets his eye, her mouth turned up. "If you haven't eaten lunch, I can guarantee he hasn't, either," he says.

It's bald-faced manipulation, and they both know it, but it does get her to set down the paperwork in her hand. "We'll have to bring it to him," she decides.

"Because you want to see the children, or because you want to eat roasted sweet potatoes?"

Mito shrugs, rising wordlessly to her feet and abandoning her desk without another thought. Izuna offers her his arm as she nears, but she ignores it to take his hand instead, leaning her cheek for a moment against his shoulder. He folds his fingers over hers, his free hand fluttering against her hair before curling behind her neck. She lets her eyes fall shut for the count of three long breaths before she straightens up, blinking up to meet his serious eyes. "Remind me to stop having council meetings," she says.

"If I did that, the council would call another meeting, so they could discuss my undue influence over public policy," he answers.

She arches an eyebrow. "If they didn't do it when you took over the information archives, they're not going to do it over not having to show up to meetings," she says. "It's all a bunch of yelling, anyway."

"Ah, but they're the ones _doing_ the yelling. For them, it's stress relief," he teases, pushing the door open and gesturing her through before him.

"This arrangement appears to leave me with very little stress-relieving," she comments, passing her hand over the seals layered in the door.

Izuna's lips quirk. "Oh?"

Mito holds his eye for a moment, before they both laugh, and she pats his shoulder as she lets him walk them down the stairs.

"We're locking up the office for lunch," she tells her assistant, to the quiet celebration of her staff. "I'll be in the library if there's an emergency," she continues, but her eyes harden. "A _real_ emergency, not Tanba crying up a storm."

"Yes, ma'am," her assistant says, immune by now to Mito's expressions. "Have a good time!"

* * *

It isn't until they're halfway down the street, Izuna telling her about the continued legal battle between the goatherds who keep trying to move their neighbors' fences over by half a foot and then arguing about it, that Mito finds what she's looking for during this excursion. "I'm confident I can stonewall them into agreeing about something instead of bothering you with it," he assures her, and then trails off when he sees her attention has wandered. "Ah. Sweet potato?"

"Sweet potatoes," she agrees, and pulls on his hand to cross the street and demand her three roasted sweet potatoes.

"Three?" Izuna asks. "Two for you, one for Tobirama?"

Mito smiles. "You learn quickly," she says, and pushes two into his hands. He looks thoughtfully between them for a moment, then lifts the left to his mouth and takes a decisive bite.

"You'll have to carry lunch, you know," he says, when he's no longer chewing.

"Not if you finish your potato quickly enough," she says.

"Leaving you to carry Tobirama's share? Why buy him one, then?" he asks, arching an eyebrow. She has the grace to look away, red dusting high on her cheeks.

"Where are we stopping for lunch," she asks, instead of acknowledging the point, which, in itself, is acknowledgment. She thinks vainly of a missive she wishes she could send to her younger self: Mistakenly eat an extra potato _one time_ , Mito, and your husbands will never let you forget it. She takes a sullen bite of her potato, then has to indelicately huff at the heat. Izuna always makes it look so _easy_.

"Well," he muses, "something we won't miss seeing half of go to the children, of course. And I would hate to make you carry anything too heavy." His eyes settle on a specific storefront - she tilts her head to follow his gaze, and snorts. "What? Do you object to gyoza?"

She takes a moment before shrugging one shoulder. "It's not me doing the objecting," she says, lifting a hand to greet the waitress, a sharp-eyed distant cousin Mito quite liked, actually, who met her wave with a pointed lifting of her own hand, prompting Mito to stop at the entryway as Izuna sailed through the curtains.

"Boss," the girl says, twisting in her chair to look at the shop's owner. "Are we letting her in?"

"Letting who - ah," says a man in his early 20's, straightening up behind the window. "Where's your husband," he asks.

Izuna raises his hand - still occupied with a potato.

"Not you, the other one," the man says, with a roll of his eyes.

Mito looks pointedly to her left, then her right. She reaches out to push a curtain aside, peering behind it, and then straightens up. The man clicks his tongue. "Come in, then, don't stand around like an idiot," he says, waving her in. She takes a step inside, feeling the distant, prickling whisper of a seal's chakra at her fingertips - the waitress, of course. The chef wasn't nearly so persnickety.

"Have you been banned from this restaurant?" Izuna asks, with a sigh, after he places their order.

"Well, Tobirama and I have," she says, not at all defensive in the least.

Izuna moves to the doorway and points to the ramen place across the street. "And that one?"

"Banned," she says.

His finger moves to the sushi restaurant next to it.

"Banned."

"Banned."

"Ban--ah, wait. Only Tobirama is banned from that one."

"Banned."

"Not banned, but that one's a tailor, Izuna."

Izuna laughs, and so does the chef, behind them.

"You want to come in with this one, Lady Mito, you're welcome any time."

Mito looks back. "Are you suggesting something about Izuna?" she asks, sweetly.

" _Mito_ ," Izuna mutters.

"Yes," says her fourth-cousin, twice removed, from the corner. "He doesn't have to argue _every_ time."

Izuna and Mito make eye contact, and Izuna's mouth quirks. "Fair enough," he decides. 

* * *

The library's announcement board is covered in fliers when Izuna and Mito pass by on their way. Mito lingers for a moment looking at them - some appear to be part-time work advertisements, at least one is a personal ad for someone who can't get a date, and, in the middle, Tobirama's collection of information about classes. When Mito spots one for adults looking to do their taxes, she laughs, and then turns on her heel to follow Izuna through the doors, adjusting her grip on the stack of baskets she'd insisted on carrying here. Izuna leaves her behind like the ne'er-do-well he's secretly always been, but that just leaves Mito a moment to admire the way the afternoon sun slats through the high windows. Izuna stops at the wide door to the children's collection, turning to look at her with a question on his face, but she shakes her head as she follows him.

The children's collection is largely books and scrolls, of course, but when Mito took one look at the proposal from the building's architect, she'd had to remind them children needed places to sit, too. Especially with her husband playing schoolhouse any time she took her eyes off of him. The play area that hollows out the other half of the room was her idea, pulled right from the letters she'd once exchanged with Tobirama as they talked about raising children in a house with a garden where a child could get dirty in the grass, safe from anything that could hurt them. (Besides bees, Izuna, thank you, she'd had to say, when he inevitably had to comment, years later.) It's strewn now with papers covered in color, toys and at least one sleeping child, and at the center of it is Tobirama, showing a girl how to hold a brush with a whisper of a smile on his face. Mito raises her chin.

"Don't teach her any bad Senju habits," she says, and grins at him when he looks up. His eyes tighten.

"A command of the variety of sealing traditions is invaluable," Tobirama answers.

" _Sealing traditions_ ," she repeats, "it's not a sealing tradition if you're the only who does it!"

"Once passed on to a student, it becomes a tradition," he answers, prompting Izuna to sigh loudly.

"We're joining you for lunch," Izuna tells him.

"We ate lunch already," Tobirama says, gesturing to the children.

" _You?_ Ate lunch? Without being told?"

He has the grace to go red at the ears. "A snack," he admits. "In a fortuitous accident, a mother sent along some extra."

Izuna and Mito share a glance. "So even the parents know by now," Izuna summarizes with a laugh. "Well, we got you something, anyway."

Tobirama straightens up as Izuna lowers himself to sit beside him, pushing the almost-forgotten potato into his hands. "I had to protect this from Mito the whole way, so you have to eat it," he says.

Tobirama leaves his erstwhile sealing student to her rote exercises to solemnly take the potato. "I appreciate your efforts," he says, and looks up to see Mito settling down the baskets of takeout across from them. He offers her his potato. "A bite?"

"After all that," Izuna complains, but Mito smiles with delight and leans forward on the table to take one anyway.

"Today we discovered I’m allowed in the gyoza place, with an escort," she tells him. "That may have to be our future strategy."

Tobirama nods thoughtfully. "Except, I imagine, for the yakiniku restaurant."

Mito thinks for a moment, and then nods. "We’re never being allowed in there again," she agrees.

Izuna looks levelly at them both, and then leans forward to open the takeout. "I still live in ignorance of what you did, and I’d like to keep it that way," he tells them, as Mito reaches out to slide her fingers across the storage seal in the base of the basket, pulling free chopsticks and setting sauce carefully down on the table.

She’s about to sit down at the table and tell the children to join them when a warm body collides with her thigh. Nearly staggering with the sudden impact, she looks down to see a child with bright green eyes and brighter red hair looking up at her. "My, Urara, what a ferocious attack," she compliments, brushing her palm over the girl’s mop of messy locks with a laugh. "And how are you today?"

"Hungry," the girl announces, holding out a hand palm up.

"You ate a bento an hour ago," Tobirama says, brow furrowed, but Mito rolls her eyes at him, and reaches into her sleeve to tap a seal. When she extracts her hand from her clothing, a mandarin orange sits carefully curled in her palm. Urara’s eyes follow the spot of color until Mito offers it to her.

"For the lady," Mito says, smiling.

"Thanks, Lady Mito," Urara says, and turns to her friends, brandishing the orange triumphantly. "I got the orange this time!"

A chorus of _No fair!_ and _I want one!_ pipes up, then, and Mito shifts to look at them all. "I have a price," she announces, and the children all straighten up to look at her. "One hug," she says, lifting one finger, "for one orange." She’s barely finished speaking when she’s abruptly swarmed, and then her attention is on making sure she packed quite enough oranges this morning.

It’s enough, although barely – the last one, the one she has to peel for a little one too small to do it themself, is on the verge of going too far past ripe, but the baby in her lap seems to like the sweetness as they dribble orange juice all over their hands and then, in short order, her obi. She pulls off her beaded bracelet without much thought when their fingers curl at the inside of her wrist, handing it to them to play with as she finally gets to her lunch. When she looks up, both Izuna and Tobirama are looking back. Her cheeks warm.

"What," she says.

"You’re ready to go on vacation," Izuna says.

She shrugs. She’s made no secret of that. "As promised, the council gets a year of my work, and then I get to let this place run itself while I occupy my time with more important things." Her fingers card through the child’s hair.

She looks up to spot a teen she vaguely recognizes picking up the scrolls scattered across the floor and puzzling over the labels for a moment. "Is there a new tiny librarian," she asks, and Tobirama glances back. The girl meets his eye and smiles brightly. Tobirama’s correspondingly soft expression is still on his face when he turns back around.

"I’m considering taking her on as an apprentice," he says.

"You already have two of those," Izuna says. "And that’s not counting that lab assistant we’re all pretending you don’t have."

"Iroha is nearly finished with their apprenticeship, so they can guide Shige while I finish acclimating her. Beyond that, Honami is _not_ a lab assistant," Tobirama protests. "You insisted I have a personal assistant after the poison incident."

"Which poison incident," Izuna asks.

"So she’s your personal lab assistant," Mito summarizes, cutting in. Something strikes her. "Are you paying her enough for two jobs?"

"Don’t worry about that," Izuna says, since he’s the only one who can be trusted to budget for the household. "Her salary is more than sufficient."

"Give her a raise," Mito advises him. "I’ll be home full time soon."

"It would hardly be safe for you to be near some of my research materials while trying for pregnancy, Mito," Tobirama tries to say, but Mito waves her hand at him.

"There’s only so many things I can distract myself with, without doing my own work," she informs him. "There will be fewer explosions involved. Ideally."

"Ideally," Izuna echoes, and then sighs. "Perhaps I’ll hire _myself_ a personal assistant."

"What would a trophy husband need an assistant for?"

"Personal upkeep," he answers, even-faced. "Otherwise, you might forget why you married me." Beside him, Tobirama looks lost, blinking between them.

She laughs, and throws some orange peel at Izuna.

**Author's Note:**

> this was written as a [redacted word so i don't get banned by ao3]. feel free to contact me @ maeotias@gmail about it if you'd like to discuss one of your own.


End file.
